What Went Wrong with Alice?

In Bergman's nostalgic film Fanny and Alexander, Alexander's new stepfather fondly rubs the boy's neck, nudges his head, musses his hair. At least the stepfather thinks he's being fond, much as he thinks he's only doing what's best for the boy when he urges Alexander to stifle his imaginative "lies." But we can tell, in part by Alexander's response, that the rubbing, nudging, and mussing are not affectionate but manipulative. Something went wrong for Alexander.

Something similar went wrong with Lewis Carroll's Alice.

Few critics have addressed The Nursery Alice (1889), Carroll's revision of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for children under five. Anne Clark devotes as much attention to the merits of the book as almost anyone does, when she says in passing that Lewis Carroll "rewrote the text completely in an embarrassingly patronising picture-show style" (231). Martin Gardner, introducing the 1966 Dover reprint of The Nursery Alice, asks, "How successful is The Nursery Alice when read today to an English or American boy or girl, upper or lower, age 0 to 5? I prefer not to guess. In some ways the language seems patronizing, but one must admit that Carroll has retold Alice's dream in a way that is easily understood by small children" (ix).¹ And perhaps other critics' reluctance to speak of the book stems from a similar discomfort with it. In fact although The Nursery Alice is interesting as a document of social history and as a record of Carroll's thought, as a work of art it fails. What went wrong with Alice?

It's not that Carroll didn't know how to revise. In the 1860's he had done a brilliant job of revising the manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground (1864) into the published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). In addition to eliminating some personal references, he clarified and embellished his text.

Sometimes he used more precise words: The Under Ground Alice changes her size simply by breaking off a bit of mushroom, while the Wonderland Alice actually swallows it, a more precise rendering of what she must do for the mushroom to take effect. Sometimes he clarifies details: when Alice is about a foot high and wants to hide the playing-card gardeners from the soldiers ordered to behead them, she no longer hides them in her pocket (how large can her pocket be?) but in a flower pot. Sometimes he improves the humor: in Under Ground Alice had to nibble the top of the mushroom to make herself larger and the stalk to make herself smaller; in Wonderland she nibbles two different sides of the mushroom—allowing Carroll to play with the notion of finding the two sides of a circle. Even Carroll's longer additions derive from a similar impluse to embellish. The "Pig and Pepper" and "A Mad Tea Party" chapters are entirely new, as are large sections of the dialogue with the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon. Appropriately, it is in these sections that Carroll adds most of his wordplay, a kind of secondary elaboration that he could develop more easily in the process of writing, as the tale grew away from its oral origins.

In revising Under Ground into Wonderland, Carroll also preserved an effective tone, as if he was still close enough to his original audience—Alice—to know how to address her effectively. He respected her and generally avoided condenscension. He knew that she'd enjoy his play with words and logic, as he did himself; he was therefore sharing his own interests with the child reader, not imputing hypothetical ones. He knew too that she'd enjoy an adventure story about a complex child who both rebels and conforms. He did not give her instruction that assumed her ignorance, nor did he give her moral pap that would teach her proper behavior.

Yet condescension and sentimentality were constant temptations to Carroll. The prefatory poems of both Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass fall prey, even though Carroll largely confined the attitude to the periphery of the Alice...